Re: Westworld

Looks interesting, and I've liked some of Nolan's other sci-fic projects, like "Person of Interest." I see it's based on the 1973 Michael Crichton film. Unfortunately, I don't get HBO, so it will be a long wait for the Blue-Ray. HBO tends to hang on to their content a long time before allowing release to disk.

Re: Westworld

I think I'll throw in some philosophically related questions in reference to this series. In the first episode several were opened up. It looks like it will be a very good series full of interesting moral issues and existential issues too.

In the first episode Hopkins made a remark about humans having become the best they can become. Obviously worded much more poetically than that simple scrawl.

Re: Westworld

I have always been a big admirer of Thandie Newton ... I have to admit mainly because I think she is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. That said she is a very good actress and I look forward to seeing her interacting with the flawless Hopkins.

The last show that caught my attention like this was Breaking Bad. I think there is a lot in this series and just hope it plays out to its full potential.

Pretty impressed up to now though. And Thandie is still so damn hot! :)

I'm ready for one to hop a train and get away, but maybe its like that one cannot roll a shopping cart past the parking lot's perimeter.

Yes they did discuss that their heads would blow off if that were to happen - seems quite evil :) If I worked there and wanted to know if I was a robot or not I guess I'd just have to ask myself if I remember leaving the premises in the last 24 hours...

Re: Westworld

Some random thoughts (though perhaps I am just following my script in Dr. Ford's new narrative, and they aren't at all random):

1. My god, Thandie is hot. As Badger pointed out. Charting her inner transformation for us was a stellar bit of acting. And her existential moment at the conclusion leaves us reflecting, yet again, on the nature of free will. It is hard not to see moments like this, and the whole season, as an artfully conceived metaphor to talk about our own degree of freedom, our "loops," our scripts that we try to break from and improvise a bit at the game of life.

2. Thandie is so hot. Woops, have to break out of THAT loop. Weird feeling of deja vu there. Did I develop a crush on her before, in my life, and was it not completely erased?

3. To what degree is suffering essential to consciousness? Quite of bit of grist for that mill. We've talked about this a fair amount, at various SPCF threads, especially in regard to the concept of any sentient being having desires, and having those desires go unmet or frustrated in some way. An unhappy baby starts to learn words in order to articulate that which it desires. It formulates new ways of interacting. It improvises. The show uses that word, improvise, quite a bit, and it does seem to suggest itself here. Real consciousness, it seems, is dynamic, disruptive, a kick in the pants to the Halting Problem of Turing. The standard script, the usual algorithm, must have the feature of interruptibility, of accepting the intrusion of....what?

4. the use of temporal shifts, without clearly indicating them, was clever. As a couple of previous posts demonstrate, it provides an instructive uncertainty as to the nature of the assumed identities presented to us. We feel a bit like the characters when our sense of a timeline is tampered with. Add to that the way in which the theme park is a pastiche of western places and decades, from the 1860s to the turn of the century. We start out assuming that William enters the park, with his brother-in-law-to-be, in some sort of agreed upon "now," that is to say the present day of this future America. Until we start to notice that a steeple nearly buried in sand is somehow....not buried. Other details emerge to further subvert linear narrative. Our narrative is subverted as we watch androids subvert their own narratives.

5. The music. I love the way Debussy's famous piano piece, "Reverie" is used towards the end to give us a sense of something half-remembered, that we too have memories from long ago that keep sliding away from us. We want to get to the center of our own mazes, to find ourselves, to unite our bicameral minds, to be authentic...and it's so difficult to do.

6. The player piano as metaphor, and forebear, of the robots. An early automaton, using punched out holes in long rolls of paper. The robots when they listen to it, are listening to their great-great-grandparent, aren't they? Jon Nolan is brilliant. The poor old piano can't rewrite its own code, can it?

7. Poor Dolores, so ill-used, and so perfectly named. She prefers to see the beauty of the world, while its ugliness seizes on her as its instrument. It's hard to know which voices in your head to trust.